Monday, June 9, 2008

I am always on the lookout for utilities that search Japanese text quickly. I came across one that did a fairly good job - it goes by the name Shin3rou (探三郎) and the one I'm talking about here is freeware.

I found that it did a great job - lightning quick searches of all Office files, PDF, html, txt, csv and AUTOCAD files, after indexing these files. When you extract the files from the zip, make sure you put them in their own folders! Otherwise when you launch the program, you'll get an error message.

Once you specify the files and directories you want the utility to index, just enter the phrase in the search box you need and hit the Search (検索） button - the results come up in a flash. Impressive! Here's a photo of the hit screen. Go get it if you have a huge glossary or an enormous translation memory you need to search while you translate.

Definitely a keeper for me. Do you know of any Japanese text indexing utility like this one?

4 comments:

This is random comment, and has nothing to do with your posting, but I thought I'd say that I really enjoy your site. I seldom post comments on blogs, but I discovered this site about a month ago and since then really like the stuff you discover. Keep it up!

I use both Google Desktop Search and Vista's search function (perhaps Vista's only saving grace!) The latter is good for searching in specific folders. The former for less targeted searches. I like GDR for the way it shows file content in the search result window. And if you configure it to to back up previous versions of documents, it can be a life saver. Several times, Vista or Office 2007 has contrived to "disappear" a doc in progress, with no way of recovery despite the program being set to save automatically every three minutes. In these cases, I've gone to GDS and copied from the latest cached version, losing only a few minutes work instead of several hours or so if I haven't saved manually.

I'd just like to echo Nick's comment. Very useful site, Gururaj. I subscribe to a feed, but don't read that regularly - but when I do, it's an education! I learned about Puretext here, and have been using it every day since. A big thankyou!

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